See, Touch and Experience
Emilia Guarnieri - From Dante to Ratzinger, we need to see, touch, and experience.
Faced with what we see happening, we need to find solutions to emerging problems, concrete and creative solutions
“The flowerbed that makes us so ferocious” is how Dante defines the earth in Canto XXII of Paradise, as he looks down on it from the heavens. However, the word aiuola should not make us think of poetry about flowers and natural beauty. Instead, faithful to the most ancient commentators, we know that by the term aiuola Dante means a small farmyard, a cramped space. And it is precisely by fighting over something small, limited, almost despicable, that men become ferocious.
While many things have changed over the centuries, this instinct for ferocity, violence, and abuse of power has certainly continued to accompany us. But history tells us that men have also learned to live together. They have known wars, but they have also lived in times of peace. Different peoples have fought each other, but they have also often been able to recognize and tolerate, if not welcome, their differences.
Western civilization has seen the affirmation of the great values of the individual, freedom, democracy, and pluralism. And it is precisely our culture that has represented a shared ideal on which to build social and political models aimed at the good of mankind and its freedom.
Today, these great ideals no longer hold true, nor are they even relevant. Political debate is no longer based on them, having become nothing more than confrontation, mutual insults, and violent opposition. From wars to environmental emergencies, from the human tragedies caused by immigration to the growing inequalities in every sphere, from the challenges posed by new technologies to the no less dramatic issue of youth, all major emergencies are opportunities for ideological confrontation rather than serious attempts to find solutions.
Even the major international institutions, now often seen as obsolete and ineffective, are frequently forced to suffer the arrogance of those in power. And today's world leaders know how to reorganize themselves according to often new logics and alliances, but always in service of their power.
And while they continue to divide up the very patch of land that makes us so fierce, a skeptical discontent with democratic systems is spreading throughout the Western world. Democracy is increasingly “tired” and powerless, as Michael Sandel's book The Weary Democracy documents well.
We are tired of appeals to ideals that no longer exist. Tired of ideologies that, precisely because they are no longer embodied in the stories of men and peoples, can only show their violent face. Tired of rules and ethical appeals incapable of mobilizing energy and action.
We need to be able to see, touch, something that is concrete, material, not manipulable. Something that becomes a real part of our lives. Bonds, relationships, shared stories, friendships, people, time, and space. And examples of all this exist. Pieces of history built on dialogue and mutual listening in situations of conflict and war are concrete things. So are all the intermediate bodies and social realities born in a context of subsidiary culture.
All social groups or works in which people come together to share needs, so as not to be alone in facing them. And what is concrete is always new, adapted to the changing times. Because while ideology lives by repeating itself, reality, precisely because it exists and happens in its unpredictability, is always new.
As Nobel Prize winner for Medicine Alexis Carrel says, quoted by Don Giussani on the first page of The Religious Sense, "ours is an age of ideologies, in which, instead of learning from reality in all its data, building on it, we try to manipulate reality according to the coherences of a scheme fabricated by the intellect: ‘thus the triumph of ideologies consecrates the ruin of civilization.’”
We truly need to learn from reality, to build the new not starting from ideology, but from listening to what is happening. We need to find solutions to emerging problems, concrete and creative solutions. As Pope Francis said on October 23 to the participants in the World Meeting of Popular Movements, “the peripheries often cry out for justice, and you cry out not out of despair but out of desire: yours is a cry to seek solutions in a society dominated by unjust systems.”
If desire is authentic, it always strives to find solutions. And solutions, in a world increasingly consumed by divisions and at the same time in constant change, require energy, creativity, and pragmatism. It is the creativity that Cardinal Pizzaballa repeatedly spoke of in relation to the challenges facing the Holy Land.
It is also the “pragmatic federalism” that Mario Draghi spoke of in Oviedo regarding the future of Europe. It is the creative impetus invoked again by Pope Francis regarding educational commitment in the Apostolic Letter Drawing new maps of hope.
We are truly in need of events that can change our lives by allowing us to experience that there is an alternative to our ferocity.
And so perhaps today, more than ever, it is worth looking again with interest at a particular event that took place in history. An event that was absolutely new, that had never happened before. Newer, more concrete, and more creative than anything we could have imagined. At a certain moment in time, God decided to become a man like us.
He subjected himself to the law of reality, becoming visible, touchable, and able to be experienced. But he did not renounce being God. He remained forever present in history. So present and so encounterable that many, many people have seen their lives change through their encounter with Him.
They have experienced in the concreteness of their lives that this man was God because He corresponded to their questions and the expectations of their hearts.
What we call Christianity is nothing more than the story of people who, for more than two thousand years, have lived in His company**—a company that is** concrete, visible, and able to be experienced. In the dramatic need for reality in which we live, perhaps the world is waiting precisely for an encounter with this Christianity.
As Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas est, “at the beginning of being Christian there is not an ethical decision or a great idea, but rather an encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives life a new horizon and with it a decisive direction.”
Unrevised text and translation by the author.